Traps (14 page)

“Ready?” Dana says.

Jessica winces.

Dana says, “Put one of those zip ties right between my two hands.”

“But how will she drink?”

Grace scrabbles her paws under Dana’s weight, straining to stand, but she doesn’t get very far. “Easy, girl,” Dana says. To Jessica she says, “I called Velasquez and asked him to meet me at the hospital with a basket muzzle, and then we’ll clip off the ties. They can drink through a basket muzzle.”

Jessica is still wincing. “Won’t it be hard not to cut her?”

“Once we’ve got the basket on, I can reach through the holes and peel her lips back easily. You’ll see.”

“Okay,” Jessica says. She holds a cable tie limply between her two hands. The blood on her hand is smeared, just tinting the puffy wound pink. “Okay.” She steps forward and fits it around the dog’s snout, slipping the tip through the eye and then tightening it with a slow, heartbreaking series of clicks.

“Tighter,” Dana says.

“But how will you cut it then?”

“I can peel her lips back. It will be easy, I promise. But if you don’t do it tighter, she’ll push it right off with her paws.”

Jessica pulls it tighter.

Dana removes one of her hands. “Let’s do a few more.”

Jessica winces as she tightens each one. She has to do four before Dana finally lets go of the snout. Right away the dog buries her nose in the soil and scrapes at the ties with her paws, just as Dana said she would, puffing loudly. The two women stand watching, Dana with her hands on her hips and Jessica covering her wounded hand with her sleeve. When it becomes clear she cannot remove them, Grace lies down and whimpers. Jessica’s lip trembles, and she bites it to hold back tears. She has always been a sensitive woman, prone to unseemly swells of feeling and tearful sentimentality, and while it has made her a good character actress, Jessica knows, it has also made her quite easy for her father to con. The lip biting doesn’t help though. It rarely does. The tears fall and Dana sees them. Jessica begins to cry a little harder; she can’t help it. There are more tears, and there is snot she wipes with an ugly sound, and Dana can see and hear all of it standing there beside her, and still nothing changes in the yard.

Then Dana walks past her, past the dog, to the pallet of pavers where the dog’s chain is tethered, and, like a character from mythology, Dana lifts a stone to free it. She drags the chain behind her and comes forward to take the dog by her collar and lead her. When Grace tries to stand she struggles a bit, making clear her age and the pain in her joints, but she
does not pull away from Dana at all, or thrash. She follows meekly, with her head bowed now, and so does Jessica, staring up at her father’s house behind Dana and the dog.

When she nears the gate Dana stops short. “Wait here. I’ll go out ahead to check the area and get her secured in the car.”

Jessica does as she’s told. She hangs back in the shade of the pink stucco wall while Dana unlatches the gate and passes through it with the dog, out across the raw soil to the curb, where a compact elderly woman in a gold velour warm-up suit stands next to a teenage girl in cutoff shorts and a halter top. The girl pulls a purple cell phone from her back pocket and raises it up in front of her face at arm’s length between her and Dana. Dana turns her back and walks toward her car.

“Well, wait,” the old woman says, walking after her. “Who are you?”

“Just here for the dog, ma’am.”

“Are you with Animal Control? That is a famous woman’s dog, I’ll have you know, and she is on her way here to take care of it. You could have yourself in a spot of very bad PR. DeeDee, are you getting all this?”

“Dang. Hang on a minute. I didn’t know there would be anything YouTubeable.”

Dana is already across the street. She opens her tailgate and, with unbelievable briskness, slides the makeshift bite sleeve off her arm, hoists the old dog up onto the deck, lowers the door shut with a click, and locks it with the remote in her pocket. The girl scurries across the street and holds the little cell phone up to the window, but with the dark tinting and the reflected light the little screen on her phone shows nothing.

“Burn! Do you think she’ll still come, Lulu?”

“Of course she will!”

“I had Mindy and Paco and them coming for pictures and autographs. Mindy made three hundred dollars last year on eBay, and Paco’s got a photo credit on Gawker.”

The old woman turns to Dana. “Won’t you wait a few minutes?”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, ma’am.”

“I think it’s very unprofessional of you not to wait. She had to drive
all the way from Los Angeles, you know. She’s going to be just sick over this, she is a very conscientious woman and her father is ill in the hospital. She doesn’t have time to be chasing that dog all over creation.”

“My apologies, ma’am.”

“Let’s go inside, DeeDee. We’ll call her right now on her cell phone. We can offer to meet her at the hospital.”

She puts a hand at the small of the girl’s back and ushers her across the raw front yard, right by the gate behind which Dana instructed Jessica to stand waiting. Dana hears the big mahogany door open and shut. Jessica hears it too. As soon as it latches, the brown gate opens and she hurries out and down one block to her own car, parked at an inconspicuous distance where Dana knew from experience to leave it.

On the way to the hospital, Dana leads. Grace is whimpering in the back of her Suburban—a high, rhythmic whine like a squeaky pump—but Dana keeps her eyes on the road, and on her rearview mirror, where she can see Jessica at the wheel of the Suburban behind her. When the hospital rises into view, Dana swings in at the far end of the lot near the Emergency Room portico, past Velasquez nodding Jessica into a parking spot he has waiting for her, and Dana continues on alone, slowing as she passes the benches at the big front entrance, where a young man with mutton-chop sideburns and low-hanging jeans cranes his neck and visors his eyes to see her, a tripod hidden clumsily in the azalea bushes behind him.

She parks at a distance between a silver minivan and a dark maroon Cadillac. She leaves the engine idling, getting out and making a show of looking at him before she crouches out of his sight line to find that Velasquez has done exactly as she instructed. Behind the left front tire of the minivan is a Petco bag, and inside it are two stainless-steel bowls, a bag of chicken-flavored treats, a black plastic muzzle with a leather strap, a nylon leash, and a plastic card key for the Holiday Inn Express with “Rm 105, North Entry” written in black marker above the magnetic
strip. It is one of the things that Dana loves about her job—that her coworkers are by requirement predisposed to reliability, to procedure and preparation.

She is still relishing these assets when Grace gives her the first hint that with her they may be useless. When Dana gets back in her car, the dog does not stop whining. Not after Dana climbs over the seats and opens the pouch of treats. Not after she fits the muzzle gently over her nose and clips the cable ties with a pair of blunt-tipped bandaging scissors she brings up from some unknown recess in the backpack from Ian’s dreams. Not after she fills a bowl with water from her cooler and sets it down in front of her, splashing a bit to make her take notice. Dana dribbles a bit through her muzzle with a cupped hand and even then Grace holds still, whining, holding her head at a dispirited cant.

It’s all she has time for. Dana glances out the back window and sees Jessica and Velasquez pass into the far end of the building while the boy with the camera sits on the stone bench by the door, his eyes fixed on her own car instead. This portion of the mission, at least, will go exactly as she plans. She drops a treat on the surface of the water bowl, hoping the scent might draw the dog’s attention later, and she begins unbuttoning her black shirt, leaning forward to remove it. She has to stretch her arms out behind her to do it, and when she wiggles out of it, she reveals a black tank top beneath, a military tattoo on her left bicep, and a pair of shiny aluminum dog tags on a stainless-steel chain. She removes her hip holster, slides up the leg on her khaki pants, slips the gun into an ankle holster on her boot, and pushes the pants back down. She opens an outer pocket on her backpack. Between a bag of cable ties and a clear film canister of safety pins is a cheap pink plastic travel soap case which she snaps open to reveal a selection of lipsticks. She checks the stickers on the bottom and finally uncaps a blackish color and cranks the rearview mirror toward her to put it on. Then she repacks her backpack, cracks all of her windows an inch, and switches her engine off.

The boy sees her coming from a long way off, of course. He squints,
shading his eyes under a purple-and-yellow Lakers cap turned sideways. Dana walks differently now, with more sway in her hips, and when she gets close, she sits on the bench opposite without even looking at him and takes a pack of cigarettes out of a side pocket of her backpack. All the while she can see out of her peripheral vision that he is watching her closely. Dana lights her cigarette and takes a drag, blowing it out to the side between her dark lips. Then she unzips her backpack and leans over, moving things around inside, her dog tags jingling, and draws out the camera. It has a wide canvas strap, and she slings it around her neck.

The boy raises his eyebrows. “Who you here for?”

“My grandmother,” she says.

The boy snorts.

Dana sets her cigarette on the concrete bench and makes a few adjustments to her camera settings, sighting through the lens at the automatic doors before letting it rest again in her lap on the concrete bench. She leans over her backpack and takes out a small padded zip bag with a different lens in it and removes it from its case. She twists the old lens with a series of tidy clicks, like a soldier disassembling a rifle, and she swaps it out for the longer lens and re-sights on the door.

All the while the kid in the baggy jeans is watching her.

“How long you been doing this?” he says.

Dana says nothing. Instead she picks up her cigarette and takes another drag. Then she takes her BlackBerry out of her backpack.

“Ooh, that’s cold,” the kid says.

Dana thumbs the keys. Nothing yet from Velasquez. Nothing work-related at all, in fact, but the boy is watching her, and Dana needs him to believe she is corresponding with someone who knows more than he does. So she opens Ian’s text.

And above his “We’ll see,” she types:

Right away he texts back:

She smiles.

It works perfectly. “Good tip?” the boy says.

Again Dana ignores him, staring at her screen.

“Your loss,” the boy says. He takes out his own cell phone. “I got a girl tipping me about an A-lister.” He makes a show of leaning over to check his texts. “I thought we could help each other out.”

Dana hits Reply again, but already the burst of pleasure that comes from any communication from him has been replaced by a familiar ache.

She types:

For a long time the ache has been born of something abstract—just that sense from experience that she cannot long hold on to anyone who gets to know her well enough to be disappointed—to discover that there is not more inside her, something she is holding back, some source of warmth or freedom they can uncover or thaw. More recently it has also flowed from something more concrete but still unscheduled—his death, which could be so much sooner than most; it could be anytime; it could be tomorrow. But the ache seems to be taking its final shape now. The object of her dread is more immediate. Dana can see now exactly how she will lose him. She even knows some of the words that will be spoken. And she knows when. It makes her want to hurry. It gives her project a deadline.

She opens the file she e-mailed to herself from her apartment the night before.

Dana reads through the bullet-pointed recommendations. She reads them twice, even a third time for good measure, still fingering the dog tags between her breasts and taking drags from her cigarette, drawing the boy’s attention. She can do this in her sleep—better than she can sleep in fact—all these careful, planful, protective acts. She can perform them for Jessica and for Ian at the same time. Two at once. It is that easy. She has packed into her backpack and BlackBerry and heart everything she needs for an endless stream of defensive feats. Here outside the hospital Dana has disguised herself to appear like the boy—callous, cavalier, shortsighted, mercenary—and although Dana is none of these things, it appears to be working. He is watching her and trying to match her, adjusting his camera settings and eyeing the door and checking his own phone. He cannot know what Dana herself is really reading. He cannot know that Dana is preparing not to unleash pain but instead to try to contain it.

She is on her fifth Sample Letter of Appeal when a text tumbles forth—not from Velasquez (not yet), but from Ian:

And she is confused for a moment. As he knew she would be, apparently, because before she can parse it, or hit Reply to ask, he sends a second text:

She smiles again, but she forces herself to hesitate this time, because above all Dana is careful. She watches the cursor blink, and knows that somewhere, probably in his breezy, messy, bird-filled apartment, he is waiting to know how she will answer. The answer that had welled up
inside her was “We’ll see,” but she believes (Dana knows) it is not the right thing to say. It is not right because it will mislead him about her plans. The plans she will follow when she is off duty and can call him to tell him the truth about what’s inside her. She cannot type, “We’ll see,” because she will not see. Dana never waits to see. Dana decides and prepares. She decides and prepares based on what she already knows.